Biography
Dr D’Ambrosio is a Consultant Psychiatrist. He graduated in Medicine and Surgery at the University of Bari, Italy, defending a thesis entitled Association of DRD2 rs1076560 polymorphism with grey matter volume in schizophrenia. Since then, his research has primarily focused on phenotypes related to pathophysiology and core symptoms of schizophrenia and on exploring how genes differentially modulate these phenotypes. In 2014, during a period as a Visiting Scholar at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development at Johns Hopkins Medical Campus, he conducted a research project to investigate the effect of schizophrenia risk genes on fMRI intermediate phenotypes related to schizophrenia. In 2015 he joined the group led by Professor Oliver Howes at King’s College London, where he conducted studies to investigate genetic and neuroanatomical factors influencing presynaptic striatal dopamine function. In particular, he investigated the in vivo relationship between a GWAS schizophrenia-associated SNP within the 10q24.32 region and dopamine synthesis capacity. Moreover, he explored the relationship between prefrontal grey matter and striatal dopamine function. To further investigate genetic factors involved in the regulation of dopamine function, he used the approach of gene co-expression network; specifically, he investigated the relationship between striatal dopamine function and a polygenic score indexing a network of genes co-expressed with the DRD2. In 2021 he was awarded a PhD (cum laude, Doctor Europaeus) in Biomolecular Sciences in Pharmacology and Medicine, Applied Neurosciences at the University of Bari, Italy (dissertation title: Regulation of dopamine function in healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia).
Research Interests
- neurobiology of psychosis
- imaging genetics
- treatment-resistant schizophrenia
key publications
D’Ambrosio, E., Jauhar, S., Kim, S., Veronese, M., Rogdaki, M., Pepper, F., Bonoldi, I., Kotoula, V., Kempton, M. J., Turkheimer, F., Kwon, J. S., Kim, E., & Howes, O. D. (2021). The relationship between grey matter volume and striatal dopamine function in psychosis: a multimodal 18F-DOPA PET and voxel-based morphometry study. Molecular Psychiatry, 26(4), 1332–1345. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-019-0570-6
D’Ambrosio, E., Dahoun, T., Pardiñas, A. F., Veronese, M., Bloomfield, M. A. P., Jauhar, S., Bonoldi, I., Rogdaki, M., Froudist-Walsh, S., Walters, J. T. R., & Howes, O. D. (2019). The effect of a genetic variant at the schizophrenia associated AS3MT/BORCS7 locus on striatal dopamine function: a PET imaging study. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 291, 34–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2019.07.005